I work a lot with doctors where there also worries about being replaced with AI. The pioneers there say that won't happen but doctors who use AI will replace the ones that don't. Same thing in our field. And just like in our field there will always be niches where AI output isn't good enough and there isn't enough money to improve it so human specialists will own it.
Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
291–300 of 829 posts
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#292Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…
> His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. It might sound really crazy and stupid today, but when SQL came out, it's advertised as one of "program-generating" languages and was su…
I think it used to be that one needs to write dedicated programs to go through large amount of data --- you need to know a programming language, all its toolchains, and the all the proper algorithms for doing the query __out-of-memory__ --- certainly above your ordinary analysts' paygrade.
With SQL you need none of those.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#293Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…
> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away?
Some people can take a business goal and figure out how to turn it into a clear spec.
Sometimes these people are programmers.
However I know programmers who suck at this and I know non-programmers who don't.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is not, it can only give out known answers to known problems based on language statistics. Are you sure you actually tried, or is this an a priori argument?
That's literally what the language model is. It might correctly generate a solution to a "novel" question/problem that is sufficiently close to one with an existing, known answer. But then again it might not. And in software development, it's going to take someone who is knowledgeable to tell the difference. I think software engineering is going to look very different in a few years, and likely be a smaller field wit…
"One of the biggest differences that we saw from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 was this emergent ability to reason better," Mira Murati, OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer, told ABC News."
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-ai-r...
I neither know how LLMs work nor how our brains work. And I don't know what could be parallel between these two. For my very very limited knowledge of how properties can emerge from unique arrangements of constituent components (the S-R latch giving rise to state - i.e. memory - comes to mind), I would not at this point write off the possibility that a very large / very deep / very intricate neural network trained on language prevalence in very very large datasets could manifest properties that we would interpret as reasoning.
And I further wouldn't write off the we humans may owe no small part of our reasoning ability to language comprehension that we begin to ascertain from infancy.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#295Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…
> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away? Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? You’re kind of assuming that systems will be generated from a one-shot prompt, but it seems more likely that an interac…
> I submit that we may reach a point where the AI is so compelling that we’ll reorganize teams/systems/businesses around it.
For starters I'd like Codex to be more than next word predictor, it should also "feel" the error messages, data types and shapes, file formats, so I don't have to explain the context. It should be part of the system, not just part of the text editor.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#296Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…
> So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language. This. I started programming in Machine Code, where the "editor" was a pad of graph paper. I've watched management- and business-focused people sneer at us geeks for my entire career, and watched them drool over the thought of finally getting rid of us. Hasn't happened yet. > I'd be surprised if the next st…
re: idea people
True. And once their product hits the market, if it ever gets there, they don't thrive.
Prior to launch they are sooooo in love with their idea that they are meticulous about features all the while thinking they're smarter than the market.
They don't understand and appreciate the value of execution. Ideas are easy. Execution - because it involves people as well as adapting to change - is 10x harder.
Yes, those people exist. Unfortunately, that bias will ultimately undermine them, but they'll never admit it.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#297[deleted]
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human. It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that for SaaS the AI will do everything directly based some internal model it has of what it believes the requirements are (e.g. it will be capable of acting just like a live web server), whereas for desktop and mobile apps, while that paradigm still remains relevant, it will generate the…
> It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that... It's inevitable that we'll reach AGI. It's inevitable that humans will extinct. Everything you described is not how today's AI works. It's not even a stretch, it's just pure sci-fi.
I'll be genuinely surprised if we don't have tools with that sort of capability within 10 years, quite possibly much sooner.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great analogy, and it makes me wonder just how closely did Carmack himself follow this advice early in his career. I suspect that he wouldn't have got where he is without an unusually deep interest in the nuts and bolts.
Well - I've read some about origin of Doom/Wolfenstein - it was definitely a mixed bag (as expected from young man), but there was definitely a focus on end result (smoother animation, better 3d), than coding just for the sake of coding.
What do you mean by “mixed bag”?
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away? Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? You’re kind of assuming that systems will be generated from a one-shot prompt, but it seems more likely that an interac…
Currently, we don't even trust the car's automatic driving capability to let it be on the roads without a human. Until that day happens, i highly doubt that a business owner would just blindly trust an AI to generate their business code/software, without hiring someone to at least look after it. Therefore, software jobs could evolve, but not disappear.
The project will be more consistent and resilient to issues but it probably take about half the time it used to take without AI, not 1% of the time. Reading AI code is damn hard, it is code review, requires exam level concentration.